Screw nuclear conflict - those things can easily end up in global extermination. It is more appropriate if China steps down on North Korea softly enough that they will not lose face, then convincing them to proceed to becoming a better nation. (Why China? I have heard that North Korea has the best relations with China.) Remember World War 1 and the minimal excuse they needed to escalate into a multinational war? I certainly do not want that part of history repeating itself with nuclear armaments in tow.

The anon attack itself is understandable but ultimately disappointing. There are much better and subversive messages that you can send to North Korea or troll them with given their state of censorship. (Coming from a tinfoil hat perspective it could however be an excellent trolling of the rest of the world if the attack itself is a hoax.)

GamerAddict7796:If China decide to continue their support of North Korea then this can go tits up very quickly. Fallout is becoming truer than we were expecting.

I think China would ditch North Korea in a heartbeat. From the looks of China's military movement it looks like they're gearing up to invade North Korea if they do anything too dumb. China and America may disagree with eachother in a lot of ways, but we are financially married and everything. China will totally let us spank their children for disobeying us and especially attacking us.

Atmos Duality:Throwing rocks at the hornet's nest again, eh Anonymous?Not sure what defacing their social networks will accomplish...

Incidentally: If North Korea fires one nuke, anywhere, whether it hits or not, North Korea will cease to exist within the year.

As a non-American, I find this hilarious, it's all a huge publicity stunt on North Korea's end, although I'm not sure exactly what they are trying to accomplish. Maybe there's a lot of political pressure on Kim, or he is trying to appear strong to people who are plotting to succeed him, but that's all hypothetical. The only thing I'm sure of is that even he wouldn't be retarded enough to launch a couple of missiles against the US, which will be countermeasured before they get anywhere close and immediately trigger a response that would erase the island off the map within hours.

"More capable of nuking US than ever!"Multiplying 0 by a number still leaves you with zero.Their leadership is retarded, probably suffering from an impressive array of personality disorders and brain damage as well, but they're not yet at the stage of actually committing suicide. They're just kind of teetering close to the edge of a bridge, toy gun pointed at temple, screaming something about yankee shankee (see, I'm racist, and primitive enough to make jokes based on Crysis!).

There is an honestly disturbing amount of people in this thread calling for the decimation of a country purely because of the unfortunate circumstances regarding being ruled by a dictatorship.

If America (and I know how ridiculous this will sound but honestly bear with me here) was to be ruled by a dictatorship, would you, the innocent civilians in appalling living conditions, want to be obliterated purely because you happened to be trapped there?

Mumorpuger:I'm baffled as to why we're just sitting around waiting for them to throw the first punch.

because they are incapable of throwing a nuclear "first punch". They are saber rattling and if they decide to invade the south it wont take long to sort out.

I don't know. If they launch any kind of nuke it will have a swift resolve and N Korea will cease to exist pretty quick as there is only really one come back.

However if they invade the south, nobody is going to use nukes. N Korea is meant to have around 10 million fighting troops that's around 5 times the size of the US military and double the size of South Korea. An it's not like the US doesn't have troops tied up over the entire world....or need a massive amount of troops at home just to secure the borders.

People forget North Korea is essentially a nation of peasants BUT they are controlled by an elitist heirachy including a very large military that are well fed, fanatical and trained soldiers (maybe not battle harded and trained like delta's or SAS but trained). Even if you assume Every US & Korean soldier involved is superior when they have that many troops it's not going to be a walk over. An the US didn't exactly win the last Korean war, infact they nearly lost the whole country.

I mean you only have to look at what the germans and russians did with conscripts who had 0 training in WW2 it's a brutal method that cares f all for lives but if you have enough troops you can wipe out supposedly superior forces.

Andy Chalk:I can't imagine the U.S. having much interest in stopping it

They will definately have an interest in stopping it. This is going to make the jobs of the real-life diplomats- y'know, the ones who are risking their lives by going into that fucking country, so much harder.

For god sake Anon, leave this one to the professionals, lest you run the risk of getting them killed. Surely even you (if you're reading) with the hardcore libertarian ideals have to agree that diplomats are not worthy of your scorn?

I'm normally all for Anon's intervention in a lot of civil-type things, and the way they got the internet going during The Arab Spring was great, but this is really treading on a minefield. What if these people do actually hear your call and rise up to fight the regime, huh? Millions will die. You can't actually hold people's hands through the internet when they've got an army bearing down on them and all the power lines have been cut.

Only naive idealists would support a move like this.

It smacks of trying to look like you're helping without actually helping.

knight steel:And the very next day north korea launched it's missiles causing America and it allies to go to war leading to an all out battle when china support's north korea due to being afraid of American solider so close by >_<

In other news,Anonimous continues to do the Governments work for them.

North Korea needs a history lesson in World War II. It would be nice for that nation and its leaders to learn the lesson of "poking a sleeping bear" without them having to learn that first hand.

If they start a global incident by attacking us or anyone else, sure, a few hundred or thousand lives will be lost. Yet, they should know that in the quick retaliation, they will lose everything and everyone and no one will mourn for them. Like the more sane version of the Illusive Man, I'm all for the advancement of all humanity, no matter the ethnicity, background, country of origin etc. However, if you poke a bear, you're asking for it.

Andy Chalk: threatening the U.S. with a nuclear attack, which it seems more capable than ever of actually carrying out.

If I smashed up the three burnt fluorescent lamps I have at home to get less than a hundreth of a gram of krypton-85, I too would be more capable of carrying out a nuclear attack against the US than I had ever before, and also more capable of doing so than North Korea.

Anonymous, in another attempt to look relevent, attacks an entire country with really childish shit that could make the right kind of maniac go off and kill people. Now, I'm not saying that NK will fire nukes at the U.S., but anything North Korea decides to do because of 'hacking infiltrators' is on the heads of Anon and thus making them war criminals. Chances are, though, they're still just full of themselves and nothing will happen.

zumbledum:Lot of misplaced faith in the west/USA'a military capabilities in this thread, cuba , korea, vietnam i know they get spun a lot but if were honest not exactly victories were they? were a month off the 10 year anniversary of the victory in iraq according to Bush but last i heard the body counts still going up daily. And the Afghan war....

OK the DPRK is backwards in a lot of ways , but they have a 5 million reservists with 3-5 years military training more than most US army does now. they have the largest fleets of subs in the world , the most special forces of any nation. they may have old jets but they do have 1700 of them. They must have at least 1000 computers for 1000 cyber warfare specialists the military has. they arent constrained by any treaties and use those blinding lazers the chinese developed that got outlawed. they do have EMP bombs gps scramblers a fuck tun load of heavy artillery and tanks.

sure they may not have a delivery method for their nukes, but of course they might its not like the UN inspectors get to go in there and we dont exactly have a good accounting of where all the old soviet stock piles went either, we do know for a fact though that they do possess a large stockpile of both chemical and bio weapons. did they get a batch of small pox off the old soviet regime? want to find out the damage a vial of that will do in a modern metropolitan city? or a weaponised Ebola strain

The very simple reason we don't go in and remove the regime is simply because we can't , the nuclear option? well apart from the hopefully obvious moral problem of wiping out a country to get rid of a regime , get yourself a map of the area, your going to do a lot of damage to china and japan a part of russia , 3 countries you probably dont want to piss off in a nuke throwing competition.

I'm not sure how old you are, so I can't be sure if you even know this happened, but there was this thing back in 1990/1991 called the "Persian Gulf War." During that conflict, the US and friends rolled up, bombed the ever-loving shit out of the Iraqi military and then proceeded to roll over the remnants and mop the desert with them. They had very similar technology and equipment, both the quality and quantity, that the North Korean military has. The MiG 21 fighter, the most common Soviet-built fighter ever, didn't manage a single kill against the F-15 (the then most advanced US fighter). They now have drones and the F-22 stealth fighter-bomber and all those F-15. They have one of the best main battle tanks in the world. In the '90s, the Iraqis even had chemical/biological weapons. They did not use them once. Why? Because the US would have deployed its host of tactical nuclear weapons and turned the border between Iraqi and Saudi Arabia into a glass parking lot.

We're talking about a country under heavy economic sanction with a technology base circa 1954 Soviet Russia. Almost all of the things you stated about the N. Koreans were true of the Iraqis in the early 1990s and look how then went for them. The Persian Gulf War lasted a few months, most of which were spent bombing the Iraqi army into submission, shooting down all its planes, sabotaging its biological/chemical warfare laboratories, and destroying its mobile intermediate range missile platforms. If there is one thing the US knows how to to, it's fight a war against a technologically inferior, numerically superior enemy.

I'm not sure how old you are, so I can't be sure if you even know this happened, but there was this thing back in 1990/1991 called the "Persian Gulf War." During that conflict, the US and friends rolled up, bombed the ever-loving shit out of the Iraqi military and then proceeded to roll over the remnants and mop the desert with them. They had very similar technology and equipment, both the quality and quantity, that the North Korean military has. The MiG 21 fighter, the most common Soviet-built fighter ever, didn't manage a single kill against the F-15 (the then most advanced US fighter). They now have drones and the F-22 stealth fighter-bomber and all those F-15. They have one of the best main battle tanks in the world. In the '90s, the Iraqis even had chemical/biological weapons. They did not use them once. Why? Because the US would have deployed its host of tactical nuclear weapons and turned the border between Iraqi and Saudi Arabia into a glass parking lot.

We're talking about a country under heavy economic sanction with a technology base circa 1954 Soviet Russia. Almost all of the things you stated about the N. Koreans were true of the Iraqis in the early 1990s and look how then went for them. The Persian Gulf War lasted a few months, most of which were spent bombing the Iraqi army into submission, shooting down all its planes, sabotaging its biological/chemical warfare laboratories, and destroying its mobile intermediate range missile platforms. If there is one thing the US knows how to to, it's fight a war against a technologically inferior, numerically superior enemy.

Im 40 , and yes i remember the Persian Gulf incident, in retaliation to kuwait being invaded and backing a UN resolution a multi national force largely being american of course rolled in and bombed the crap out of alot of dessert and some tanks.Thing is i also remember we stopped and didnt achieve a damn thing, 10 years later we had to go back and do the same again. and as we sit here behind our computer screens 23 later were still watching the coffins come back on a daily basis. America alone has lost around 4.5 thousand KIA and 32k Wounded since we "Won"

I also recall all the inquiries and investigations that went on to conclude that the WMD's that were used to get us involved in the second war were a fabrication , they never existed.

But using the dessert section of either gulf war as an example of how we would deal with a NK conflict? just a tad not helpful dont you think?A modern mechanized army given a 100 click sight radius can call in bombing runs close air support or just use artillery to blow the crap out of anything before it can fight back

North korea is 60% woodlands and 20% mountains. so the previous korean war or vietnam might be better parallels.

Saddam was a despotic tyrant that didnt trust his own military had no great tactical sense and didnt bother pulling his troops back to urban settings, Kim is a living god beloved by his people who does trust his military. Iraq had according to the highest American reports ive seen 600 thousand troops, most reports came in several hundred thousand lower, and these were largely conscripts with little to no training or equipment.Korea on the other hand with 9,495,000 active, reserve, and paramilitary personnel, it is the largest military organization on earth. America quite sensibly ill add likes to have a 10:1 advantage in fact it needs it to have a war fast enough with low enough casualties for the american populace to stomach. so that's 100,000,000 troops you need to find somewhere. and as every person in the NK goes through 3-5 years of military training going up to 10 for those going on to do more. your not going to face goat herders who have been handed a AK who are fighting because they are scared of the secret policeman behind them. your going to be fighting door to door tree to tree with a fanatic group of people who are willing to die for their living god and in defense of their homeland from what they view as an evil imperil-st invader.

Iraq had no chance to use its air , NK with 1700 jets might be a different kettle of fish. lets assume you get to shoot them all down with no casualties its sitll going to cost 1.700.000.000 in ordnance, But as a US congressional report put it " While much of the equipment is outdated, the high saturation of multilayered, overlapping, mutually supporting air defence sites provides a formidable challenge to enemy air attacks."

NK also has the largest submarine fleet in the world. Now im sure out in the open ocean vs the modern american NAvy/air power they wouldnt pose much of a threat but making short range sallies out of heavily armoured /hidden sub pens even the biggest carrier is going to be at some risk.

Iraq had no WMD's it was a massive lie used to start the second war. NK definitely does possess nukes and chemical. sure it might not have miniaturization levels for ICBMS but as the main thrust of any invasion is going to be straight through the DMZ they dont need to "launch" anything. who knows what they procured in the soviet brake up and the issue of small pox has to be considered as a very likely problem.Also they are not held by any treaties they are free to use those lasers the Chinese developed that were banned for being too indiscriminate in causing blindness over a large area. they also possess EMP devices GPS scramblers so its not as if their tech is that outdated in all area. sure thier jets and tanks are outmoded but in urban, forest and mountain scenarios that matters less than in a dessert

When we hit Iraq it was the first invasion, now with heavy entanglement in Iraq and Afghan going in to NK would be doing so with a vastly reduced and highly strained military.

oh The nuclear option, it isnt an option. Nukes are WMD's designed for a world ending fight, if were going in to NK its going to be to affect a regime change and enforce democracy on another country that doesn't want it. so nuking the populace is a bit of a self defeating thing to do . now if you get a hold of a globe you will see another problem , there's no way to nuke NK without hitting Russia, China, south Korea and japan there's a thing called fall out. and at least 2 of those have quite large nuclear arsenals that unlike NK are capable of hitting around the world.

In short NK is safe. we dont have the troops the will or the cash to go in there. and they dont have the oil to make it worth it.

I was not interested in why the US went into Iraqi, I already know that. I also wasn't interested in a motivation. I'm not advocating a preemptive strike against N. Korea. However, given the stance that the US has in regards to its South Korean and Japanese allies, I feel that it's reasonable to assume that should N. Korea try anything like an invasion or a missile strike, then that would be a valid excuse to finally finish what was started in the Korean War.

As for how the war would go, I am hesitant to use the Korean War as an analogy given the vast increase in technology on the part of the US since then. Considering that the US Air Force has access to multiple photographic intelligence satellites, combat-capable drones, and a host of precision munitions, they could quite easily eliminate most of the major threats in a matter of weeks. The largest issue becomes the threat to Seoul (and the rest of S. Korea) and Japan that the N. Korean army poses in the form of artillery and missile strikes.

As for nuclear weapons, I would agree, that option is unthinkable, to an extent. However, there exist tactical nuclear weapons and while their ethicality is subject to debate, it is possible to use them to devastate targets, like a column of tanks, without irradiating Russian, China, and Japan. I would also agree that costs of fighting N. Korea are extremely prohibitive. It would be a battle of attrition and a very large portion of the North and South Korean populations would die or be displaced.

In the end, I would hate to see such a war because it would likely mean the destruction of Seoul and I have a lot of friends and even some family there. I'd be happy to live and let live, but Kim and friends see the need to act like children and make threats that they should not be eager to back up with force.